Smile, You're on Bootleg Camera

Leander Kahney
03.08.02

One should never underestimate the inventiveness of the criminal mind.

After last week's story about a teenager who used his iPod to copy software from a demonstration computer at CompUSA, it has emerged that there are myriad clever ways to steal software from computer stores.

Wired News readers submitted dozens of tawdry tales involving built-in CD burners, digital cameras and even the Internet, which was used to send software from inside an Apple store.

Many readers said it's long been known that the built-in CD burners of demonstration machines are great for making pirate copies of software.

One reader even told how a not-too-bright CompUSA employee actually copied some software for him when he asked to test an iMac's built-in CD burner.

"The CompUSA employee gladly complied," the reader wrote. "They inserted my CD-R into the drive, and then they dragged files to the recordable media. Among these folders and files they dragged over to burn, they copied AppleWorks, the Apple productivity suite that retails for $99 separately. I walked out with a burned CD of an application I didn't pay for, and I didn't ask for.... Why be covert, when the employees are happy to help?"

The reader, who asked to remain anonymous, said he later destroyed the disc.

"This sort of stuff goes on all the time in school environments," wrote J.R. Griffith, multimedia chair of a high school in Houston. "We catch students all the time either trying to burn to the CD-R or copy to their (Iomega) Zip drives or Jazz drives."

Some readers said using FireWire hard drives like the iPod harkens back to the old days, when software was copied from stores using floppy disks.

"I did this same sort of in-store piracy with floppy disks when I was 18 years old," wrote Darin Adler in an e-mail. "I even brought floppies with my own copying program to circumvent copy protection. It's just a temporary technical anomaly that programs are too big to copy quickly without newer technologies like FireWire."

Officials from CompUSA and Apple did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Another reader, who also asked to remain anonymous, described how a "friend" used his digital camera to copy software from a Los Angeles Kinkos.

"I know of someone who got software from Kinkos in this way," he wrote. "They had two 64-MB memory cards, though 128-MB (and possibly 256-MB) are available. One can also put in a program like Aladdin System's StuffIt Deluxe, execute it on the target computer and pack things down quite a bit.... A couple of minutes of relative privacy is all it takes."

The use of a digital camera is particularly sneaky. People often take cameras to stores to test their compatibility before buying a new computer.

Perhaps the cleverest method of snagging some ill-gotten software was described by Machacker, who claims to have sent himself software over the Internet from inside an Apple retail store.

"I was at the mall with some friends on the way to an Underoath concert," he said. "We stopped off at the store, and I did it for kicks."